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Slavers' War
The Slavers’ War was a three-way conflict between the three gangs that controlled the slave trade in the Detroit Wasteland, the Gentlemen, the Shackles and the War Bears. The conflict was deliberately provoked by an external fourth party who ensured that it would escalate to a point of mutual destruction. The result was that not only were all three gangs wiped out, but the slave trade in the Detroit Wasteland was completely destroyed. Background During the mid-23rd Century the slave trade in the Detroit Wasteland had been controlled by a pair of organisations. The first was the Gentlemen, a long-lasted and well-established slaver gang that made claims to a long linage and manufactured an air of class and respectability to cover up the fact that they were repulsive creeps. The second was the powerful Hellfire Gang which had risen to prominence off absorbing and conquering other raider gangs. Rather than compete with each other, the two gangs cooperated to divide the city into territories and avoid stepping on each other’s feet. The decline of the Hellires during the 2260s and 70s disrupted this balance. New gangs emerged that did not respect the alliance between the two, especially given the Hellfire’s descent into decadence and lethargy. Some of those entered into the Slaver trade themselves, a move that the Gentlemen actively tried to suppress in the hopes that they would be able to maintain a monopoly over the trade for themselves. Instead, they wound up squandering their resources during the 2270s in a series of turf wars that only served to align opposition to their efforts. By the early 2280s, two new gangs had emerged and come to dominate the Slaver Trade. Despite only dealing in male slaves, the War Bears were the most powerful of the gangs, largely thanks to their very militant and aggressive culture and leadership. The second was the Shackles, who seemed to thrive under a leadership that was otherwise more concerned with their own comforts and surrounding themselves with toadies. The Gentlemen had been reduced to the third biggest slaver gang in the city, putting them in last place (The Hellfire Gang, while still extant, had essentially been forced out of the business through their consolidation). Their efforts to displace the other two had failed and instead left them depleted, reducing their holdings and influence. However, the Gentlemen refused to accept the situation, and instead sought ways to overcome this setback and reassert their dominance. History How to make raiders fight each other The root cause of the conflict lay not with any one of the gangs, but with Linda Olsen, an employee of Bob's Tavern, a popular trading post. Behind the scenes, Olsen had been quietly running her own anti-slaver agenda, trading in information and even going so far as to hire mercenaries to undercut their activities. In early 2287 she stepped up her operations, moving from simple disruption to an effort to cripple the city’s raiders. Using a not inconsiderable amount of caps that she had “come in to”, Olsen hired a mercenary group to act on the intelligence that she had gathered. This team were tasked with staging attacks against all three slaver groups in the hope of inflaming tensions between the three of them. These attacks were deliberate and targeted, directly going after active operations, killing or driving off the slavers while rescuing their victims. As expected, the three gangs each blamed the other for the attacks, assuming that the others were trying to undermine their business for their own benefits. The War Bears, who had to this point suffered the most from these attacks, were the first to act. Having learned that members of the Shackles were meeting with a mercenary band he sent soldiers to deal with them. Instead the skirmish blew up into a bloody battle that left numerous raiders for dead on both sides, while the mercenaries were not present. As expected, the Shackles launched a retaliatory attack which served to only further inflame tensions, but did not bring an end to these well-coordinated strikes. Bear has eaten you After several weeks of escalating violence, Hugh Janus, the leader of the Gentlemen, sent messengers to the War Bears in the name of arranging a meeting. Janus saw what had been happening between the War Bears and the Shackles, and saw an opportunity to bolster his own gang in the process. His plan was to form an alliance with the War Bears to wipe out the Shackles. Of course, that would still mean that he had to deal with the War Bears down the road, but at the very least it would be one less enemy to deal with. Janus arranged a meeting with Man Beast, the War Bears’ leader, in a neutral ground between the territories occupied by the two gangs. Once there, he explained the situation and how he felt the two of them should team up against the Shackles. A key part of his pitch was about how the pair of them, as men, should put Furey a woman, “in her proper place”. In response, Man Beast snapped his neck. No sooner had Janus’ body hit the ground then the War Bears gathered for the meeting struck, falling on the assembled Gentlemen and killing them in short order. Driven by this sudden victory, Man Beast urged his followers onwards, launching a series of attacks on the Gentlemen’s territory that drove the other gang back with heavy casualties. Several Gentlemen outposts were destroyed, while in the process a large number of slaves inadvertently escaped. Well that escalated quickly Seeing the War Bears and the Gentlemen attacking each other, Andrea Furey launched attacks against the territory of both gangs. Seeing the opportunity, she decided that she was going to destroy both gangs so that the Shackles would be the sole power in the city’s Slaver trade. These attacks were initially successful, catching both gangs off-guard as they were engaged with each other. This netted her some territory, while further weakening the other two gangs. Unfortunately, she failed to plan for what happened next. Realising what had happened, both the War Bears and the Gentlemen attacked the Shackles territory, eager to avenge their losses. In short order, the Shackles’ gains had been reversed, with the War Bears and Gentlemen quickly regaining what they had lost. Of course, neither gang stopped there and instead pushed further into the Shackles’ territory, eager to wipe out their mutual rival. However, Harvey Fontaine, the new leader of the Gentlemen, could not let the insult to his gang or its honour go unpunished, and sought to avenge the betrayal and murder of Hugh Janus. Once the War Bears were fully engaged with the Shackles, he ordered attacks on their territory in the hope of squeezing them between the two gangs and crushing what he saw as their most dangerous enemy. Instead, his advance stalled as the War Bears proved to be more resilient than expected and put up a determined counter-offensive. The end result of these actions was a constantly shifting morass of territories, offensives, counter-offensives and revenge attacks that came to consume all three gangs. If one gang attacked another, the third would find some way to take advantage of the situation. The three soon lost sight of what they were actually doing and instead became focused entirely on killing the others. Slaving activity ground to a halt as no gang could now spare the manpower for fresh operations, lest they be attacked by one of the others. The peasants are revolting By June of 2287, the situation had swung against the Gentlemen. Starting out with the smallest territory and the least number of raiders in their employ, the gang had suffered badly at the hands of their rivals. Fontaine had proven to be only a mediocre leader, and certainly not popular with his men. But at the same time, he was all they had and, by the gang’s rules, he was still their leader and it was not like there was an abundance of options. Losses to the other two gangs had pushed the Gentlemen back to a narrow strip around their hotel headquarters. They were hounded on both sides, with the War Bears almost at their door. Because of the disruption of slaving activities (few potential buyers were willing to walk into a warzone) the hotel was now stuffed full of unsold slaves who now outnumbered the Gentlemen themselves. The situation was ripe for exploitation. A revolt broke out among the slaves who quickly overpowered their guards and took their weapons. More concerned with the threat from the other gangs, the Gentlemen were not ready for a revolt from within, and found themselves quickly overpowered by their former captives. The remaining gentlemen were executed (Fontaine was killed with an inappropriately applied pool cue) with the slaves putting their heads on display outside the hotel. The Gentlemen, the oldest surviving raider gang in the city, were no more, but the war was still ongoing. Bringing down the house While the fall of the Gentlemen was a major breakthrough for both the Shackles and the War Bears, neither gang was in a position where they could fully take advantage of the situation. Both were still locked in combat with the other, and neither could afford to back down. While both had suffered losses, the situation had worked slightly in the favour of the Shackles. Furey’s lieutenants had largely consisted of sycophants with few actual skills; as they had been killed off, more competent underlings had taken their place. While the territories of both gangs had shifted (Including absorbing those formerly held by the Gentlemen) they were also both stretched thin due to their ongoing loses. Furey still held her headquarters at Club Caprice, and believed it to be safe from attack. This allowed her to take to the field in order to deal with the War Bears personally. However, she made a critical miscalculation, one that would ultimately cost her everything. Furey left only a skeleton staff at Club Caprice, figuring that it would not need more then that to defend it while she was in the field. In early July 2287, the same group of mercenaries that had instigated the war managed to infiltrate the club. Once inside, they liberated the remaining slaves, killed the Shackles staff and then put the building to the torch. Its decrepit condition meant that it went up quickly. Seeing what had happened, Furey was enraged at the thought that she had just lost all her stuff (Oh, and also her gang’s headquarters and maybe also some of her people as well). Believing that the War Bears were responsible for the attack, she threw caution to the wind and a direct attack on the War Bears, aiming to drive to the heart of their territory. Instead, the result was a bloody battle that inflicted considerable casualties on the War Bears, but at the cost of wiping out the Shackles. Furey herself died at Man Beast’s hands. Nobody wins The War Bears had been the last gang standing, but their victory was a hollow one. The gang had suffered severe causalities and were only barely able to cover their own territory, let alone those of the two vanquished gangs. However, even this victory would be short lived as the gang was targeted by a series of attacks by the over the next few weeks coming from the same mercenary crew that had been responsible for so much else during the conflict. The War Bears were picked off, with their own slaves being released along the way. Aftermath The Slaver’s War saw the complete destruction of the Slaver trade within the Detroit Wasteland. The three gangs who had previously controlled it had all been wiped out, with nothing left for them to rebuild from. A series of discrete actions by the mercenaries involved ensured that nobody would step up to take their place; however, the escalating war for Detroit quickly ensured that simple survival was more important than entrepreneurial efforts. By the end of 2287, there were still no active Slaver gangs in the city. Ironically, many of the former slaves released from the three gangs would come together to form their own community in the Gentlemen’s former headquarters. Category:History